hand plays (shadow play series)

Shadow play series (14 pictures). An X-ray practice is somewhat similar to a cave where a form turns into a shadow on a wall. All radiologists experience this, because radiography proceeds like a shadow play, that is to say like a projection : indeed the hand, that acts as a barrier to the rays, will leave an imprint on a numerique plate, which is determined by the density of its constituents, exactly like a photogram. Thus, X-ray radiography has much more to do with photography and its history than we could have imagined.

So I asked puppeteers and shadow-makers to replay the childish bestiary of shadow puppets, to experience one more time the blurred line between light and X-rays (which is the foundation of Röntgen’s discovery). These images remain to be decoded, but this time by anyone and not only by a specialist/These images should be accessible to everyone, not just specialists, for decipherment.

In the end, this imagery of the “me”, which usually only targets a “patient”, becomes an image of the “us”, because it refers to and even finds some poetry. According to the people who posed for these images, there is something sovereign about mimicking a wolf or a deer with the bones of one’s hands because medical X-rays only present a “diminished” reality of ourselves (and not an “augmented reality”), since they evacuate our skin, our history, our affect…